Different sort of free Wi-Fi starts to thrive

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, June 12, 2008

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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In front of a crowd of city employees and press, San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom addresses his new budget plan in the San Francisco Police Department Tactical Operations center located in Hunter's Point Shipyard on Monday, June 1, 2008, in San Francisco,Calif. less

In front of a crowd of city employees and press, San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom addresses his new budget plan in the San Francisco Police Department Tactical Operations center located in Hunter's Point ... more

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

Different sort of free Wi-Fi starts to thrive

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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that citywide wireless Internet access is slowly becoming a reality despite political infighting - and that 144,000 residents will be surfing the Web for free by the end of the year at no cost to the city.

Standing on the rooftop of a Mission District single-room-occupancy hotel, Newsom pointed to a "repeater antenna" - which looks like an oversized, white computer mouse - and said the devices someday will blanket the city with free Wi-Fi.

The devices are made by a South of Market company named Meraki, and hundreds now dot the rooftops and balconies of private residences, nonprofit hotels and public housing projects.

Meraki is donating the devices plus free Internet access to any San Francisco resident who wants them. Neighbors within a block's radius of the device can tap into the Internet for free, too. Blanketing the city is expected to require 15,000 devices.

The company, founded two years ago, is using San Francisco as a testing ground to bolster its name and reputation so it can sell more devices elsewhere.

The mayor's office is working to ensure that SRO hotels and public housing projects are some of the first to receive the devices because residents there typically don't have Internet access. Five public housing projects now have the technology, and 13 more are expected to have it by the end of the year, Newsom said.

Newsom is calling the idea Wi-Fi 2.0 - a nod to his high-profile but unsuccessful first attempt to bridge the "digital divide" between San Franciscans who take Internet access for granted and low-income people who can't easily log on to e-mail, find job listings or surf news sites.

After years of negotiating, the city agreed last year to a deal in which EarthLink would pay San Francisco $2 million for the right to build, install and run a free Wi-Fi network and to team up with Google to provide Internet service.

The deal needed approval from the Board of Supervisors, but many members expressed concern for a variety of reasons.

Some worried about users' privacy, others about whether the connection would be fast enough to make it worthwhile, and still others about whether the plan amounted to a monopoly giveaway of a public resource.

EarthLink backed out of the deal in August. On Wednesday, some supervisors said the mayor finally has come around to their thinking about Wi-Fi.

"I'm glad the mayor finally sees it my way," Supervisor Jake McGoldrick said. "You don't need to hand over city assets. I never thought the city needed to give away a public asset and create a monopoly. ... It took him three years to finally see the light of day. I'm very pleased, very pleased."

Board President Aaron Peskin said he always thought there was a "more democratic solution" and pointed out that cities around the country are having problems with their Wi-Fi partnerships with EarthLink.

"We made the right decision," he said.

Newsom remains aggravated the EarthLink deal fell apart and still blames the supervisors.

"They made it crystal clear they did not want it to succeed - for no, I would argue, good reason," he said Wednesday. "This has been a very frustrating process to make real the commitments we made years ago. ...We just didn't give up. We never take no for an answer."

Meraki plans to blanket the city for less than $5 million. It will deliver download speeds of 1 megabit per second, three times faster than the free access proposed in the original plan.

"We're excited to be changing the way people get online," said Sanjit Biswas, CEO and co-founder of the company.

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